Solstice musings: poetry, nonfiction & Mom’s Christmas letter. [This originally ran December 16, 2008.] When I read poems and when I (rarely) write them, I’m apt to think This is an essay! When poets gave up rhyme and meter, they exposed the fact that poetry and creative nonfiction can be one in the same, though poets are free to fictionalize. (Long ago I was taught the only definition of poetry is that the poet controls the length of his line.) The similarity does …
Nonfiction faces challenges in writing from another’s point of view; but do the genre’s constraints limit its claims to art? A version of the post below first appeared January 20, 2009. I was thinking about it because I re-read Tim O’Brien’s revered short story “The Things They Carried,” and read for the first time Ron Hansen’s immortal short story “Wickedness,” both of them very essayistic. And O’Brien’s, anyway, is often claimed by practitioners of creative nonfiction because it seems autobiographical. …
I can only speak for myself, but there’s something about writing at night that feels . . . sneaky. There’s an outlaw quality to it, combined, oddly enough, with a sense of being safe. It has an anaerobic, subterranean feel; it’s as if I’m working beneath the soil, toiling in secret, trying to cultivate something hidden and occult.—Alethea Black, “Essay to be Read at 3 a.m” I Knew You’d Be Lovely by Alethea Black. Broadway Books, 238 pp. I read …
My interview with Shirley Hershey Showalter concludes with her discussion of her writing process and of her vision for the potential for memoir, a “radical act,” to build peace in the world. Q: You prepared for writing a memoir by reading and attending workshops, so I suspect you’re a what fiction writers call a “pantser” instead of a “plunger” for the actual writing. Did you outline what you’re now writing or make a timeline or otherwise make yourself a roadmap? …
Guest Post By Olga Khotiashova The golden rule of software engineering says that perfect code must be simple; it shyly omits though that one must be a professional to understand and appreciate such code. When I, a non-native English speaker, began reading The Maytrees by Annie Dillard, I was struck by a feeling, keen and simple like a death sentence: When will I understand American literature – NEVER. The crash of one more childish illusion. Then what made me keep …
From Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing: It doesn’t bother me that the word ‘stone’ appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that ‘wind’ and ‘gray’ appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn’t use them that often I’d be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable. In fact, most poets write the same poem over and over again. Wallace Stevens …
In our correspondence about his memoir The Blessing, I asked Gregory Orr about the accusation sometimes leveled in the literary world that memoir is mere “therapy,” whereas in fact memoir writing may stir the psyche in disturbing ways. His response appears as a guest post. Guest Post by Gregory Orr Therapeutic—that term has such a bad odor among us. I wonder why? “That’s not art, it’s therapy.” You hear that a lot, but I have to wonder what’s going on …